"Maidenhair" by Mikhail Shiskin ***

• Open Letter Series
• Summer Read With Beth 2013
• Russian author
• Originally published 2005
• Setting:  Interview area for incoming refugees to Switzerland
• Vocabulary:
• parvis:  a vacant enclosed area in front of a church
• Quotes:
• p.35..."People who were once together and fairly close, meeting after many years, seek out that lost intimacy, although they've become completely different people."
• p.63...."You have to live like a river--flow without knowing you're going to freeze come winter.  But then winter comes and the river freezes.  Tolya, you have to live level with your times and not spill over its banks.".....
• p.80..."I realized there what freedom is.  It's not absence of barbed wire.  No.  It's the absence of fear. It's when no one can get to you.  When you have nothing.  When you're not afraid of losing anything.  When you say something and stick with it to the end."
• p.92..."...here it says that the human body is extended in time, and in that way fills the space with itself everywhere."...I completely do not understand the meaning of this sentence!!
• p.92...."Saying there's no God is like trying to convince children that they've never had parents."...weird one
• p.96..."I don't know how it is with you, but here words take shape at night, coalescing out of the word-fog."
• p.120..."Now that I'm old and have lived my life, now I don't understand anything.  It turns out that life is living from understanding to not."
• p.121..."Your story is the groom and you're the bride.  Stories choose the person and start wandering."...interesting concept
• p.132..."You said yourself that we're just mitts for stories to put on in winter to keep warm in the cold."
• p.138..."Someone once said that every person has a hole in his soul the size of God, but that's just silly.  Every person has a hole the size of love."
• p.256..."The worst thing about the Apocalypse, then, is that there won't be one."
• p.256..."This is the Apocalypse, in face, here, very ordinary, cold, with drifting snow, just smeared across time.  Everyone dies, just not simultaneously.  But what's the difference, in essence?  One way or another they leave by the world, the generation, the empire."
• p.268..."We're blind from birth.  We don't see anything and don't pick up on the connection between events, the oneness of things, like a mole digging its tunnel and bumping into thick roots, and to the mole these are just insurmountable obstacles and he can't imagine the crown these roots nourish."
• Notes:
• the beast was "fog"....that which obfuscates...falsified reports that allowed people through
• interviewers become inured to the horrific stories of refugees
• the surprise felt when someone seems perfectly nice, then turns beastly
• beautiful tale of being handed across a river by two trees, one on each side......lovely!
• Review:  This is one of those books that starts off with a bang and then slowly fizzles.  Initially, I would liken the reading experience to be very similar to reading Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" or "Midnight's Children", which requires an ability to give oneself over to the stream of consciousness of the novel in order to absorb the themes and to see patterns.  In this case, by midway through the book I was there and did not enjoy the rest.  The themes are powerful ones in this novel set in the Swiss office for interviewing people requesting refugee status.  They include:  the savagery of mankind, love, development of numbness to savagery after hearing and seeing too much of it, and how life fits with scripture.  Quite an interesting collection, but again, the book fizzles for me.  Darn!